What Team USA’s nail-biting win vs. Serbia says about the Americans — and Nikola Jokic

Jammed into the drama, exhilarating finish and near-shock of Team USA’s escape against Serbia Thursday in the Paris Olympics men’s basketball semifinals sits two truths that, at first blush, might feel a bit counterintuitive.

The first is that Team USA, despite the 95-91 win and its accompanying berth to Saturday’s gold medal game against France, is a flawed-if-destined champion, with an emphasis on “flawed.” That a team with such an overwhelming force of talent would need to scrabble and claw like that at the end to win — despite stellar outings from Steph Curry, Joel Embiid and LeBron James — points to problems that may not ultimately matter but exist nonetheless.

And that very much could matter in the years ahead, as international basketball becomes even more daunting.

And the second is that Nikola Jokic, despite losing, delivered a stunning indicator of his historic greatness that begs for a reevaluation of whether we properly respect his place in the game’s history — despite the widespread belief he is its best current player, despite the fact he’s won three of the last four MVP Awards, despite the championship he won last summer and those many think he’s likely to win in the future.

Let’s start with Team USA.

The slow start and shocking hole Team USA found itself in Thursday is simply baffling. At one point, our team, America’s team, was down 17 points to a Serbian squad that has very, very few NBA players. Despite Curry’s red-hot shooting en route to 36 points. Despite Embiid, shaking off ample criticisms of his Olympic run with 19 points on 8-of-11 shooting. Despite LeBron James notching a rare Olympic triple-double.

Team USA was still, for large stretches of the game, discombobulated, poorly functioning, and, yes, overmatched.

Jayson Tatum did not play, again, reigniting the head-scratching rotations that head coach Steve Kerr has deployed at times. The slow start, too, seemed to invite a disaster that, while it did not ultimately happen, certainly came close.

These Olympic games are 40 minutes instead of the 48 of an NBA Game — almost few enough, it turned out, to allow this team’s flaws to outpace the talent advantage that ultimately won the day. It didn’t go that way. But it could have.

It is hard, and maybe unfair, to criticize a team that has not yet lost, and is now on the cusp of a gold medal. But such are the way of things when expectations — fair ones, in fact — mean anything short of gold is a failure.

America vs. The World can seem like the turtle and the hare, but with a different ending. Because while this team’s mid-game naps haven’t yet upended its inherent advantage, that will unlikely be the case in the future. France will probably not beat the USA on Saturday. But the French just might in 2028 in Los Angeles — along with a host of other teams — if the red, white and blue play like this again.

And those American teams, most likely, will not feature Curry, LeBron or Kevin Durant.

The international depth of talent in basketball is real, and growing. America, it seems, can still win through its sheer individual talent for now, but that is unlikely to be true in the years ahead. These other teams need to be taken much more seriously.

A fact Serbia almost showed us, thanks to Jokic. And that is the second amazing truth in this game, despite Serbia’s loss: The reality that Nikola Jokic is so great — perhaps beyond what we’ve quite yet accepted or grasped — that he nearly raced this Serbia team past the United States and the likes of LeBron, Steph, Embiid, KD, Devin Booker and Anthony Davis — all the stars who flickered and almost went dark against the Serbian talisman.

Bogdan Bogdanvic is a fine player, OK, sure, but he’s not Steph Curry — even if he looked like him for stretches Thursday. Ditto, in theory if not in the NBA, the other names who held their own for much of the night against the USA, guys who drained 3s, who fed off of their leader’s greatness, who for much of the game believed they would in fact do the impossible.

That’s the magic of Jokic. And had he led Serbia past the USA and then won the gold medal game on Saturday — which he almost did, and which he then probably would have done — it would have been perhaps the single most impressive basketball accomplishment in history. 

That he didn’t doesn’t change the arithmetic of his greatness. Jokic, on Thursday, despite losing, looked to my eyes like a top-five all-time player. A player so great — the gravity, the open looks he created for his teammates, the easy buckets he made for them, the confidence he infused them with, the way his mere presence made them all levels beyond their own actual individual skills, the fact Serbia was better than America for so long — that we have to reconsider what Jokic may be when his career is over.

The man could be one of the all-time, all-time greats.

Yes, he has only one championship. But he’s never played with an NBA All-Star, nor an All-NBA player, and yet with Denver — as with Serbia — his greatness makes the level of his teammates perhaps not matter.

I’m not sure we’ve accounted for that properly — what he’s done, and with whom he’s done it.

Team USA won on Thursday. But the way they had to win should have us looking at Jokic with fresh eyes, open to the possibility he may actually be one of the greatest players in the game’s history.